Solipsis: Escape from the Comatorium

by Jeff Pollard

  Renee comes to her senses, sitting in a pile of debris. Medved sits up next to her, seemingly okay. “Where's Mom?” Renee asks. They clear the debris and stand up in the footprint of their house, apparently unharmed. They search frantically through the debris.

  A gurgling sound coming from a pile of concrete gets their attention. They approach it slowly. Medved carefully clears a large chunk of tile floor and finds Gwen. Her body is crushed, nearly flattened in some places. Her skin clings to shattered bones. She coughs up blood. Medved lays down next to Gwen, trying to comfort her. Renee stares in horror. Gwen is in extreme pain. If this were earth, she would have been killed instantly. But here...she has to endure the pain, to know what it's like to be crushed.

  Renee falls to her knees on her flattened mother's side. “Why is she in so much pain?” Renee is in shock.

  “They turned the pain sensors up,” Medved replies quietly, looking away from the grotesque scene.

  “We have to fix her right now” Renee says, “Medved!”

  “Yeah,” is all Medved can say, overwhelmed by the sight.

  “Come on, help me,” Renee says, trying to pick up her flattened mother. Gwen screams in agony.

  “Stop,” Medved says. “The televators are off.”

  “Are you telling me we can't defrag her? She's stuck like this?” Renee demands.

  “Wait, wait.” Medved has an idea, “some televators are not changeable. It's a fail-safe in case something gets screwed up in an update. Some of them should still be on.”

  “So we can get back to Earth!?”

  “Probably not, if they cut the line, then we can't get out. But they can't turn off defragging. It's not editable.”

  “So where are those televators?” Renee asks.

  “Downtown. It won't be easy to get there,” Medved admits.

  “We have to,” Renee says. “She's going to go mad from the pain if we don't. Help me.” Renee sets to removing the shards of glass and debris from her mother's flattened body. Gwen clenches her eyes and tries to comfort herself by repeating some inaudible phrase. Renee delicately pulls out a shard of glass. Gwen screams in pain.

  “This is no use,” Medved says.

  “We just have to get her head to a televator, right?” Renee asks. Medved's eyes acknowledge this unsavory truth. “Find me something sharp.” Medved doesn't move. “Are you gonna help me or not?” Medved hesitates

  “Mind over matter,” Gwen repeats with her eyes jammed shut. Medved finds a sharp glass shard and holds it toward Renee.

  “I can't watch,” Medved says. Renee takes the glass shard and nods. Medved averts his eyes and Renee gets ready to decapitate her mother.

  “Mind over matter,” Gwen whispers faster and faster. Renee holds her mother's head firmly in one hand and a large glass shard in the other. She takes a deep breath and presses the sharp edge against Gwen's neck. Gwen tries to hold her tongue, but can't, letting out a terrible scream. Renee has to shut it out. Her eyes focus, she sees nothing but the neck and the glass. Medved sneaks a peek, only to immediately turn away in disgust. Renee keeps focused, jamming the glass shard deeper into her neck. She hacks at the skin, tearing the tissue. She pulls on the skull, ripping the neck apart. Renee puts her knee on Gwen's shoulder. She twists and tears the head from the spine, slicing at stubborn tissue that barely hold the sides together. All that's left is the spine. Renee firmly plants both knees on the naked spine, grabs Gwen's screaming cheeks, and twists. The bones crackle and snap. Renee tugs but can't quite get it to separate. Renee puts the head back down, cuts at the spinal cord through the separated vertebrae, then picks the head up again and tugs. It still won't budge.

  Medved grabs the head and yanks it right off with his giant bear paws. He takes Gwen's head and holds it like a baby.

  Medved and Renee walk briskly towards the skyscrapers looming ahead of them. “How do you know these televators will even work?” Renee asks.

  “It's a fail-safe, it's something that can't be changed. This is supposed to be a safe world.”

  “I don't understand,” Renee says.

  “Your brain has an understanding of how it interacts with the world outside of it. People had a tendency to go into the games and lose track of reality. Solipsis is the safe world. It's just like Earth, same physics, same feelings, everything. It keeps people from losing track of what's real.”

  “What does that have to do with the televator?” Renee asks.

  “Well, that's one of those safety things, like there aren't allowed to be any explosions or guns in Solipsis. It's written into the world architecture. That way if someone's shooting a gun at you, you know you're still in a game world. The televators originally were uneditable. That way, no matter what happened, if there was some kind of bug or a crash, they would still be there and you could get out fine or defrag if you had to. After a while, crashing stopped being such a problem and we stopped making them uneditable because people wanted to customize them. So most of them are editable, and when whoever it is took over, they turned them off. But those old televators, the ones that have been here from the beginning. Those are still on.”

  “It's weird to hear you talk about the logic that went into making the world I grew up in. I grew up on a planet that's like twenty years old. Isn't that god-damn profound?”

  “I guess so,” Medved says, looking down at Gwen's unconscious head.

  “So how many are there? The original televators I mean.”

  “A hundred...maybe,” Medved says as they approach the city. Glinting in the hot sun over the city center are several figures, flying in circles. As they near the city, Renee and Medved can finally make out the figures: Angels, clad in gold armor, with large white wings. They circle ominously, like golden vultures.

  18

  The city is deserted. A group of angels inflate a hot-air balloon. It sluggishly takes to the sky. Alongside, behemoths pile together the original televators on top of a metal mesh. “What are they doing?” Renee asks.

  “They're closing our only exit,” Medved replies, still holding Gwen's head. Her eyes are rolled up in the back of her head. Behemoths come to the clearing carrying more televators. They pull the wire mesh taut into a ball containing all of the working televators.

  “So much for that idea,” Renee says.

  “There's gotta be a televator around here they didn't find,” Medved says hopefully. He looks at the skyscrapers all around them. “Come on.”

  Renee follows Medved, sticking to cover, hoping not to be seen.

  “Where are all the people?” Renee whispers. Even at such a low whisper, she feels like her words will carry for several deserted blocks.

  “I don't know,” Medved replies.

  “I was just here, they were all frozen in place, hundreds of them. Where are they?”

  The glass canyon starts to ripple like a pond. The waves in the glass grow stronger. “What is that?” Renee asks. A stampede of people appears around a corner. But what are they running from? Renee and Medved stand frozen in the path of the stampede.

  A dragon rounds the corner and unleashes a giant fireball at the backs of the stampeding crowd, lighting dozens of people on fire. Medved starts running and yanks Renee free from her terrified stare.

  Medved and Renee have a few hundred yards lead on the stampede, but then they see where the stampede is heading. A group of fifty-meter-tall behemoths stand in the way, prepared to smash the crowd like ants. It's an organized slaughter. Renee and Medved stop in their tracks. The stampeding crowd blindly bears down on them. Medved takes Renee's hand and rushes to the side, toward an alley. Two armored angels land in their path and bring swords to bear, daring Medved to keep coming. The swords glow blue, as if they were made entirely of a focused torch of flames.

  The wave of stampeding people crashes into Medved and Renee, splitting them up. Medved clings strongly to Gwen's severed head, still fervently whispering prayers. The stampede ends as the noose is tightened on the people, like predators
closing in on a school of fish. The dragon, the behemoths, and the angels close the crowd together. Two behemoths, massive creatures, pull on a gigantic structure of steel, rolling it out from a side street. The steel box, five stories high, is lined with razor wire around the perimeter of the open top. The monsters snatch people up a handful at a time, dropping them into this rolling prison.

  Renee watches in horror as people all around her are plucked into the sky and dropped into the prison. The floor they land on is slanted toward one side, causing the pile of humanity to slide to that end and fall to the floor below, slanted in the opposite direction. She pushes, scrambling toward the edge of the crowd, but she can't overcome the force of the stampede. A behemoth's hand comes for her, one of its thick fingers jams down the back of Renee's shirt as it grabs the man right beside her. Renee takes to the air, but then Medved's paws emerge from the crowd, grabbing Renee's foot. Renee's shirt stretches and she falls twenty feet to the tops of the crowd. On the backs of the masses, they surf to freedom.

  A perimeter of angels surrounds the crowd. Those who attempt to run past the angels are cut down in an instant. The blue swords cut through them effortlessly. Medved leaps from the top of the crowd, tackling two unsuspecting angels. Renee follows right behind, running through the opening and into an alley. Medved gets up and follows, leaving behind an angel with a collapsed chest lying helplessly on the pavement. Whoever is piloting these avatars definitely aren't vivisected. These are people using consoles, entering this world like it's a video game. They might be bigger and stronger, but their coordination is only as good as their controls. But they feel no pain, and they can respawn from any televator.

  Renee and Medved emerge from the alley running free into a deserted street. Two angels run from the alley, giving chase. “There it is!” Renee shouts, the ball of televators is dead ahead, though the balloon has nearly lifted them off. Medved runs alongside her, carrying Gwen. They run into the opening. A small behemoth sees them, stomping into their path. This smaller monster is about the size of a grizzly bear, but covered in elephant-like skin. Medved charges toward the monster. He hands Gwen off to Renee running behind him.

  “Follow me!” Medved shouts. He charges into the behemoth, knocking it off balance, sending him spinning and falling to the ground. Renee runs right behind Medved, through the path cleared for her. The enmeshed ball of televators is just ahead. An angel immediately swoops in, kicking at Renee as it flies over her. The blow clips her ear. She clutches her head, but keeps her balance. She feels heat on the back of her neck, the warmth from a flaming sword. She hears wind rushing from the strong flapping of the angel's wings. The heat on her neck grows more intense. The angel flies low, his wingtips barely staying off the pavement. He flaps harder, trying to bring Renee within reach. He lunges, reaching his sword out. But before he can swing, Medved catches up to him, diving and grabbing his foot. The angel smacks face first into the pavement.

  Renee keeps running for the balloon as it rises into the air. She runs harder and faster, leaping for the metal mesh, trying to grab it with her one free hand. She catches the mesh with only two fingers, they pull back, over-extending. Her fingers slip and she falls, landing on her back.

  She looks straight ahead as the balloon lifts into the sky.

  Medved helps her up. The angels stop pursuing. The behemoth trudges away. The monsters concentrate on capturing the encircled group of people. Renee and Medved head for the shadows.

  Renee and Medved find themselves alone in the street. Most of the people have been rounded up, thoush many have slipped through the cracks. Angels and demons are searching the city and the suburbs. In the growing silence, all they can hear is Gwen mouthing the words, “mind over matter.”

  They wander the streets, looking for anything, a sign of hope, an idea, another survivor, but finding nothing but an empty city, a virtual ghost town. The ball of televators hangs ominously over the city. So close but so far.

  “They had to have missed a televator somewhere,” Renee says.

  Medved and Renee emerge on a rooftop of a skyscraper. They hear hushed words and freeze. Medved sneaks around a corner, they find two other survivors, crouched against the edge of the building, looking into the distance and talking quietly. They're startled by Medved, turning and holding up make-shift weapons in defense.

  “It's okay, I'm on your side,” Medved says. One survivor is a chiseled, perfect man. The other is an extremely beautiful woman with gigantic breasts. She's probably just the avatar of an old man, but with the display system turned off, there is no way of knowing. They look back to the horizon. Outside of the city, past the suburbs, past the lake, past the mountains, to a horizon glowing red. “What's out there?”

  “See for yourself,” the male survivor says. Medved's jaw drops as he peers through the binoculars.

  “What is it?” Renee asks. Medved hesitates, not wanting to let her see. Renee snatches the binoculars away then sees for herself. A line of rolling prisons can be seen heading toward this red horizon. Through the mountains, she can glimpse geysers of molten rock spewing into the air, demonic monsters, it's a hellish scene.

  “Who is doing this?” Renee asks. Nobody will offer an answer. “Seriously, what aren't you telling me? This isn't a game right? This is real! We're hostages. Are they holding us for ransom? God dammit, tell me something! Who's doing this?”

  “Christians,” Gwen chokes out audible words for the first time in hours.

  “What?” Renee asks. Medved tries to hold Gwen tight, keeping her away from Renee.

  “God dammit, let me talk to my daughter,” Gwen insists. Medved relents. Renee takes her mother's head from Medved, retreats to a corner of the roof, sits down and holds her close.

  “It's Dr. Lazarus's church” Gwen says quietly.

  “The community of christian scholarly fucking brotherhood?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Why are they doing this? What'd we ever do to them?”

  “They think we're cheating death,” Gwen says.

  “I don't understand.”

  “God has a plan and we're changing it, we're going against what god wants, in their minds,” Gwen says.

  “It's god's plan for us to be dead?” Renee asks. “If god wanted us dead, wouldn't we be dead?”

  “You have to understand how they think,” Gwen replies, “to them, life is just a preparation for judgment. Ultimately we'll have to go to heaven or hell based on how we lived. If you put yourself in their shoes, and look at the world, you see us, these people who are avoiding judgment, we're cheating. By keeping people alive, they think we're keeping people out of heaven, away from god.”

  “So they're just gonna kill us?” Renee asks. Medved walks over slowly.

  “No,” Gwen says quietly. “If they were going to kill us, we'd be dead already.”

  “They're sending us to hell,” Medved says, in shock. Renee turns back to the red horizon. A plume of volcanic ash comes over the mountains, obscuring their view of hell. Renee stares at the very real hell that awaits all of them.

  “Everything's going to be okay,” Gwen's severed head tries to comfort her, but her tears betray her.

  “Are there any televators left?” Medved asks the other survivors.

  “What does it matter, they're not working,” the man replies.

  Renee holds up Gwen's severed head, “It does matter.”

  “I know of one they might have missed,” the female survivor says.

  19

  Renee runs quickly from one building entrance to the next, minimizing the time she is in the open. The group uses this technique to move through the streets of Solipsis. Behemoths can be heard walking nearby, patrolling the streets. Angels fly high above, searching for any survivors. They can hear and feel the footsteps of a nearby behemoth, but can't tell where it is. “How far is it?” Renee whispers to the woman as they prepare to cross another street.

  “Two more blocks,” the woman replies. She looks
to the sky, waiting for patrolling angels to disappear. Then she leads the way as the group crosses a street. “It's that building,” the woman says excitedly. They're not far at all. The crushing footsteps of the behemoth grow louder and they take cover along the side of the street. The monster trudges by, not seeing them. Once the monster passes, they start to cross the street. The behemoth unleashes an unholy bellowing howl. The monster has eyes on the back of its head, which the survivors had not noticed. The beautiful woman leads the way as they try to cross the street and get to the door. The behemoth dives at them, crushing the woman. Two angels swoop in, alerted by the behemoth's call. They run for it. An angel catches up with the man, slicing him clean in half with his blue flaming sword. The angels are gaining on Renee and Medved.

  Renee runs as fast as she can. Her stride seems to become longer and longer. Her stomach churns with vertigo. Something is not right. She seems to hang in the air between steps, as if she's being pulled up by a balloon that makes her weigh less. A vendor's cart on the side of the street accelerates down the street seemingly by itself, just ahead of Renee. Everything on the street starts moving in the same direction. Renee takes a last step then finds, in total panic, that she doesn't come back to the street, she's in free-fall, along the street. She tumbles through the air, unable to control her fall. Medved is right behind her, unleashing a fearful roar.

  Gravity has been turned ninety degrees. Everyone and everything falls across the city. The pursuing angels dive at them. The street is a dead end, a towering glass and steel structure awaits them. Medved grabs Renee, holding her tightly. Everything not bolted down falls sideways across the city, toward hell.